The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

by William Dalrymple

At the same time it was widely recognised that it was Indian wealth that was now helping propel Britain’s economy and that ‘the first and most immediate consequence’ of the failure of the EIC would be ‘national bankruptcy’, or what amounted to the same thing, ‘a stop to the payment of interest on the national debt’.56

the contrast between the bankruptcy of the Company and the vast riches of its employees was too stark not to be investigated. There was also a personal element to this: 40 per cent of MPs owned EIC stock and their finances had all been severely damaged by the fall in its value.

Clive responded on 21 May 1773 with one of his most famous speeches, saying he objected strongly to being treated like ‘a common sheep-stealer’.

I am an ELITE sheep stealer."

Clive talked powerfully in his own defence for two hours. Making a final plea, ‘leave me my honour, take away my fortune’, he walked out of the chamber, tears in his eyes, followed by loud and repeated cries of ‘Hear, hear!’

The Resolution was eventually rendered harmless by a series of amendments and another praising Clive’s ‘great and meritorious services to this country’. In the end, after an all-night debate, Clive had been cleared by a vote of 95 for censure to 155 for clearing his name.

Disgusting

The Company enjoyed chartered privileges, guaranteed by the Crown, and its shareholders were tenacious in their defence of them. Moreover, too many MPs owned EIC stock, and the EIC’s taxes contributed too much to the economy – customs duties alone generated £886,922* annually – for it to be possible for any government to even consider letting the Company sink.

The colossal loan of £1.4 million* that the Company needed in order to stave off its looming bankruptcy would be agreed to. But, in return, the Company agreed to subject itself to a Regulating Act, defined by Lord North’s India Bill of June 1773, which would bring the EIC under greater parliamentary scrutiny. Parliament would also get to appoint a Governor General who would now oversee not just the Bengal Presidency but those of Madras and Bombay as well.

The world’s first aggressive multinational corporation was saved by one of history’s first mega-bailouts, an early example of a nation state extracting, as its price for saving a failing corporation, the right to regulate and rein it in. But despite much parliamentary rhetoric, the EIC still remained a semi-autonomous imperial power in its own right, albeit one now partially incorporated within the Hanoverian state machinery.

The man to whom Parliament first gave the job of Governor General was not some political appointment new to India, but a 41-year-old Company veteran. Warren Hastings was one of the most intelligent and experienced of all Company officials, plain-living, scholarly, diligent and austerely workaholic.

was the failure of Hastings and Francis to work together, and Francis’s ambition to get Hastings recalled and himself become the ruler of Bengal in his place – ‘this glorious empire which I was sent to save and govern’ – that was to lead to many further problems for the Company and effectively paralyse its goverment in India in the years to come.

Although he was ultimately vindicated by Parliament, he never recovered from the bruising treatment he received at the hands of Burgoyne and his Select Committee. Despite escaping formal censure, he was now a notorious and deeply unpopular figure and widely regarded around the country as Lord Vulture, the monstrous embodiment of all that was most corrupt and unprincipled about the East India Company.

Not long after his return to England, on 22 November 1774, at the age of only forty-nine, Robert Clive committed suicide in his townhouse in Berkeley Square.

Fuck him.

The truth was more unpleasant: Clive had actually cut his jugular with a blunt paperknife.

Hastings’ aim had been to help Shuja stabilise his western frontier by stopping the incursions of the unruly Rohilla Afghans, but Francis rightly pointed out that the Company’s troops had effectively been leased out as mercenaries and under Shuja’s command had participated in terrible atrocities on the defeated Afghans.

Under the malevolent influence of Clive, who had always distrusted Hastings’ Indophilia, Francis had arrived in India already convinced that Hastings was the source of all the evils and corruption of Bengal.

His two fellow councillors, both peppery soldiers, neither very bright, went along with all that Francis suggested, having been won around to his views in the course of the year-long sea voyage to Bengal.

Hastings’ first major change was to move all the functions of government from Murshidabad to Calcutta. The fiction that Bengal was still being ruled by the Nawab was dispensed with and the Company now emerged as the undisguised ruler:

Yet Hastings wished to retain and revive the existing Mughal system and operate it through Indian officials, only with the office of the Governor General and his Council replacing that of the Nawab. He even went as far as proposing that no Europeans should be permitted to live outside Calcutta, except at a few select factories connected with the Company’s trade.

Underlying all Hastings’ work was a deep respect for the land he had lived in since his teens. For, unlike Clive, Hastings genuinely liked India, and by the time he became Governor spoke not only good Bengali and Urdu but also fluent court and literary Persian.

Over the years, the more Hastings studied Indian culture, the more respectful he became. Under his patronage, and under the guidance of the Persian scholar and pioneering Orientalist Sir William Jones, who was brought out to superintend the new legal system, an ‘Asiatick Society’ was founded in 1784 which, among other projects, sponsored the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita, for which Hastings composed a rightly celebrated introduction:

Under Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Society became the catalyst for an outpouring of scholarship on the civilisation of what Jones called ‘this wonderful country’. It formed enduring relations with the Bengali intelligentsia and led the way to uncovering the deepest roots of Indian history and civilisation.

Moreover, Hastings’ interest in the Gita was not just antiquarian: aspects of its philosophy came to guide him in his personal life and he took as his own maxim the sloka [verse], ‘Your entitlement is to the deed alone, never to its results.

Hastings came to loathe Francis – ‘this man of levity, the vilest fetcher and carrier of tales … without one generous or manly principle’ – with the same intensity as he himself was hated by his nemesis.

So began a period of intense political conflict and governmental paralysis in Bengal, generating what Ghulam Hussain Khan, who was baffled by the Company’s methods of decision-making, called ‘an infinity of disturbances and confusions which perpetually impeded the wheels of government’.

As he himself wrote, ‘All business stood still, for the Board is continually occupied in collecting proofs of my demerit, and of the virtues of my adversaries.’93

Both courts had their capitals in the south: Company control of the north and east of the peninsula may now have been assured, but the same was far from true of the south and west.

In 1761 the Marathas had received a major setback at the Battle of Panipat when, outmanoeuvred, poorly supplied, surrounded on all sides and hungry to the point of malnourishment, disease and weakness, they were catastrophically besieged on the plains outside Panipat by Ahmad Shah Durrani’s invading Afghans.

The second power was a new force, which in the 1770s was just emerging and beginning to flex its military muscles: the Mysore Sultanate of Haidar Ali and his formidable warrior son, Tipu Sultan.

Both the Marathas and Tipu’s Mysore Sultanate would in time develop to be the two fiercest and most challenging military adversaries the Company would ever face, and the final obstacles to its seizure of peninsular India.

It had taken Indian states some thirty years to catch up with the European innovations in military technology, tactics and discipline that had led to the Company’s early successes; but by the mid-1760s there was growing evidence that that gap was fast being bridged:

The anxieties of the directors were shown to be fully justified when, in August 1767, Haidar Ali declared war on the Company and descended the ghats east of Bangalore with a huge force of around 50,000 men. Of these troops, 23,000 were cavalry, but 28,000 – some twenty battalions – were trained units of highly disciplined sepoy infantry.

The Mysore sepoys’ rifles and cannon were found to be based on the latest French designs, and the Mysore artillery had a heavier bore and longer range than anything possessed by the Company’s armies.

They had mastered the art of firing rockets from their camel cavalry to disperse hostile cavalry formations, for example, long before William Congreve’s rocket system was adopted by the British army.98 Haidar and Tipu had also developed a large bullock ‘park’ of white Deccani cattle to allow them rapidly to deploy infantry and their supplies through their kingdom, a logistical innovation later borrowed by the Company.

In the end, the Company sued for peace. Haidar was successfully bought off: a treaty was signed and the Mysore forces returned home. But the fact that the Company could now be so easily surprised and defeated was a lesson noted with satisfaction in many courts in India, particularly that of Haidar in Mysore and the Marathas in Pune.

In February, without consulting Hastings in Calcutta, the Bombay Council got itself entangled with internal Maratha politics and signed an agreement with one of the Marathas’ ousted leaders, Raghunath Rao, offering to reinstate him on the throne of Pune as regent to the young Maratha Peshwa. On 24 November, this rogue expedition, unauthorised by Calcutta, left Bombay harbour and set off towards Pune with just 2,000 sepoys, a few hundred European cavalry and artillery, and a force of 7,000 of Raghunath Rao’s Maratha cavalry.

Egerton’s force made slow progress uphill. On 30 December it finally reached the top of the ghats, having marched only one mile a day, with 19,000 bullocks pulling the guns and supplies up the steep switchbacks. They then spent a further eleven days trying to reach Karle, site of some celebrated Buddhist cave monasteries, a distance of only eight miles. By this time they had almost run out of supplies, as well as giving the Marathas ample time to prepare their defences.

Two days later, having run out of supplies, they threw their heavy cannon into a temple tank, burned what remained of their stores and at midnight began a chaotic, starving retreat. The Marathas soon detected their movements, surrounded them and fell on the column at first light: 350 were dead before noon.

The reputation of the Company’s army would never be the same again. But as well as exposing the limits of the Company’s military power, the failed Pune expedition also revealed the degree to which the Company now had ambitions to reshape and interfere in the politics of the entire South Asian region.

By the coming of the summer heats in May, concrete plans were being formed for a Triple Alliance to oversee ‘the expulsion of the English nation from India’. A month later, in June, news reached Madras that Haidar Ali had received a large shipment of arms and military stores from France.

Moreover, while on paper there were meant to be 30,000 Company men under arms guarding the Madras Presidency, it was quickly calculated that fewer than 8,000 could actually be gathered together in a month. The speed of Haidar’s movement reduced the numbers still further: many sepoys had families living in Arcot. When it fell to Haidar’s forces large numbers of sepoys deserted their regiments to attempt to protect their wives and children.

The following day, on 15 August 1780, Philip Francis challenged Warren Hastings to a duel.

It was at this point that it became clear, as Pearse noted, ‘that both gentlemen were unacquainted with the modes usually observed on these occasions’; indeed, neither of the two most powerful British intellectuals in Bengal seemed entirely clear how to operate their pistols.

Ten days later, on 25 August 1780, the Company’s largest concentration of troops in southern India finally marched out of Madras and headed south along the coast road towards Kanchipuram to confront Haidar. At their head was Sir Hector Munro, the Highland general who fifteen years earlier had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat when he broke Shuja ud-Daula’s lines at Buxar.

Munro should have waited for Baillie to join him, but, as impatient as ever, and hearing that there were ample provisions and a full magazine in Kanchipuram, which Haidar might otherwise have seized for himself, Munro headed off with his small force, when a single day’s delay would have allowed the two armies to unite.

The officer in charge of the relief column begged Baillie to move immediately, and to use the cover of darkness to rejoin Munro’s force in the shelter of the Kanchipuram temple, now only nine miles away. But Baillie ignored the advice and did not move off until first light. It proved a fatal hesitation.

In the course of the following hour, under Baillie’s direction, the Scottish square repulsed thirteen successive charges from the Mysore cavalry. Failing to break the line, Haidar ordered a pause, and brought forward his biggest guns. Around 8 a.m., the heaviest cannonade of all began from close range, with grapeshot scything down the ranks of thickly packed redcoats.

After expending all the remaining gunpowder, Baillie tried to surrender and tied his handkerchief to his sword which he held aloft. He and his deputy, David Baird, both ordered their men to ground their arms; but straggling fire from some of his sepoys who had not heard the order meant that the Mysore cavalry disregarded the surrender and refused to give quarter.

Out of eighty-six officers, thirty-six were killed, thirty-four were wounded and taken prisoner; only sixteen captured were unwounded.

Around 200 prisoners were taken. Most of the rest of the force of 3,800 was annihilated.120

By this time my wounds began to grow stiff, so that I was unable to move from the position I was in, or to defend myself from the swarms of flies which, getting into my wounds, seemed determined to suck the little blood that was left in me. I was covered with them from head to foot. It was a species of torture to the mind as well as to the body, keeping me continually in mind of my own helplessness.